The Final Solution

Author: Michael Charbon
Publisher: Harper Perennial 2005

There were three reasons why I bought this book.

(1) The cover reminded me the artwork on walls and some restaurants in an around University of California at Berkeley.

(2) It is a Harper Perennial book.

(3) It is a small book (131 pages).

It turned out Charbon lives in South Berkeley and his wife, a former professor at Berkeley Law School, is also a writer.  In an interview with PBS’s Steve Inskeep Chabon said that he was inspired to write this book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  He thinks “Conan Doyle is not given enough credit for the quality of his writing”.

An 89 year old former detective is living alone and keeping bees, mostly, to stay active.  Europe is still in the middle of the second world war and one day a deaf Jewish boy walked in to his village with an exotic African Parrot.  The parrot repeated a sequence of numbers, in German.

“Zwei eins sieben fünf vier sieben drei”

Could these numbers be a secret code?  Could they be numbers of a Swish bank account?  Everybody in the village wants to know.  Naturally a series of events followed and our former detective, 89 years old and all, was in a thick of an investigation.

Inskeep asked Chabon: Would you mind reading a passage of your book that gives us a sense of what this old man is like that you have reconstructed here? 

Charbon:  “Even on a sultry afternoon like this one, when cold and damp did not trouble the hinges of his skeleton, it could be a lengthy undertaking, done properly, to rise from his chair, negotiate the shifting piles of ancient-bachelor clutter—newspapers both cheap and of quality, trousers, bottle of salve and liver pills, learned annals and quarterlies, plates of crumbs—that made treacherous the crossing of his parlor, and open his front door to the world.  Indeed the daunting prospect of the journey from armchair to doorstep was among the reasons for his lack of commerce with the world.  Nine out of ten he would sit, listening to the bemused muttering and fumblings at the door, reminding himself that there were few now living for whom he would willingly risk catching the toe of his slipper in the hearth rug and spilling the scant remainder of his life across the cold stone floor.”

This novel belongs to the genre known as “literary novels”.

Chabon won the Pulitzer prize for his novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” in 2001.